Anno Domini 2014

This summer, I plunged into the depths of my back up drives and came up with some old projects that were growing some dust. Like most old projects, I find them, get excited. Decide to do a major revolutionary revamp, and ultimately just end up touching up some things and kicking them out the door. The DropFramework is one such thing. For a long time, I wanted to make my own micro-framework to compete with the likes of Slim or Silex. In the end though, I really feel that those two have the space of micro-frameworks very well covered. No...

Getting started with Piston can be a little daunted right now. Mostly this is because it’s a project that is still evolving and which has either little documentation or documentation that rapidly becomes wrong. A lot of games that I found made with Piston can no longer be compiled, a lot of example code needs various minor tweaks to get to compile, etc. That said, the two best items that I found where: Piston Tutorials: Getting Started Which is buried in the Piston-Tutorials repository without any link from the other documentation Piston-Mov-Square Which is just a very simple program that...

A rather rambling design document for my ideas for a Centipede clone that I’m releasing under the MIT license. Following all my reading in Rust it seems like a good idea to have some kind of project to complete. After scrounging about for ideas, I came up with the one of doing an open source centipede clone using Piston. This would be good practice for trying a Rust Ludum Dare next April. The following is more or less a rambling stream of consciousness design doc for what I’m about to do. I’ll probably follow this up with a series of...

I just started delving into Rust last week with the release of the Rust Guide. In Web Development, I really have moved away from the “bare level” languages of my schooling into the flighty realm of scripting languages. For the most part, I’ve been quite satisfied to leave behind the rigors of memory management and obtuse C linking errors for PHP, JavaScript and Python. Yet, Rust is the first systems language that really has gotten me excited to sit down and try it out. Maybe get back into the indie game scene (which I have been saying forever). This post...

TimeKeeper is a little utility tool that has become both a pet project for testing out new PHP and JavaScript tools as well as a very useful tool that I use every day to keep track of my billable hours, projects and tasks that are completed through out the day. An example of TimeKeeper in action can be found at timekeeper.kynda.net This week, after a year of dormacy, I updated TimeKeeper to v0.1.1 with a major internal refactoring and improvement in the interface’s “responsiveness.” Major improvements include: The UI is now 100% responsive thanks to a rewrite of all templates...

The following sketches are from my field notebook. They were done while taking a
native plants class with Klara Varga in Jackson Hole. In particular, these
plants were all found growing along the roadway through the Elk Refuge.

Tech News and Tutorials Super Pi Boy I have plans on creating what I call the “Raspberry Arcade” – a Raspberry PI with emulators to play all the old NES and Atari games of my youth that don’t work. This is just an amazing mod of a game boy and Rasberry PI into one. The Internet’s Original Sin Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet I think a theme for myself this week is really inter-operable protocols. These two articles really belong together since they are both discussing the essentially same thing. A transition from an internet where...

This is a new series I’m thinking of creating. It’s more for my use than it is for anyone else. A weekly list of all the blog posts, articles, videos, etc. that I uncover through the week that I found interesting or worthy of sharing. Tech News & Tutorials Using Bootstrap the Right (Semantic) Way An excellent look at how bootstrap is in some ways a regression back to table-based html and away from semantic html. This is something that has always bothered me a little about bootstrap – just how much it looks like a recreation of tables. Granted,...

North of the open dunes is North Juniper Hill, the tallest of the St. Anthony
Sand dunes at 6,625 ft and a rise of roughly 1,000 feet above the surrounding
fields. It’s sandy all the way up to the top. We took two days backpacking, this
photo is a cropping of a 360 degree panorama of 21 stitched images.
North Juniper Hill
Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX
Shutter: 1/320 sec
F-Stop: f/9
ISO: 250
Focal Length: 35mm
Lighting: None
Stitches: 21

The St. Anthony Sand Dunes west of St. Anthony, Idaho are perhaps one of the hidden gems out here. It took us almost a year to bother checking them out due to all the talk of ATV use. It is true, the dunes are infested with ATV droning on, but by late evening it seems like they die down and leave a little peace and quite. The dunes themselves are quite impressive, we thought we would be seeing some small dunes or patches of sand, instead we found massive open dunes rising 300 feet above the nearby potato fields. The...

Were to begin? This post is a kind of smörgåsbord of random thoughts and musing regarding editing and creating documents. It all really began when I started contemplating learning LaTeX, which lead to a good deal of time spent thinking about what is a document and from there to extrapolating much of the best-practices for web development into a wider sense. Namely, that a web page is merely a marked-up document and that the principles of separating style from content ought be considered in our document processing. I think that Allin Cottrell says it best: Word Processors are Stupid and...

I was just going through my photos from my return trip to the Southwest which included Arches, Canyonlands, Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon. For some odd reason, I was not in a big photography mood despite loading up all of my equipment. I left my camera behind on the backpacking portion and only stopped to quickly snap a few panoramas along the way. I’ve included those panoramas below. I find myself wishing that I had taken more time with them. Perhaps with a little more editing in post, I could bring them out. Delicate Arch, Arches National Park Model:...

I decided to spend the last couple of weeks introducing myself to some of the big MVC Javascript Frameworks that have gotten so much traction over the last couple of years. I sadly, have found the field littered with frameworks that happily violate the principle of Unobtrusive Javascript and am wondering – is there any solid MVC Javascript Framework that is clean and unobtrusive, will I need to keep rolling my own, or am I just a Luddite? Unobtrusive Javascript Now first, I must admit that I feel as though I am a technological Luddite when it comes to the...

I had my first real exposure to the HTML5 Canvas element this week. It was a fairly fun transport back to Intro to Computer Graphics and my school days working in C. Canvas provides a very simple bitmap surface for drawing, but it does so at the expense of loosing out on a lot of the built-in DOM. I suppose there is a good reason for not building an interface into canvas to treat drawings created with contexts as interactive objects, but sadly this leaves us with having to recreate a lot of that interactivity (has a user clicked on...

Perhaps one of the most scenic diversions from I-90 when driving across
Montana. A turn off at Big Timber and head south arcing along W. Boulder Road
to Livingston. In this instance, I caught a freak ranstorm that was coming down
over the wilderness.
Settings
Model: Nikon D80 /w Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S DX
Shutter: 1/160 sec
Exposure Program: Manual
F-Stop: f/9
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 35mm
Lighting: None
No of Stitched Photos 4

In the spirit of the season, I hope to do a little navel gazing. So, if reading through a pile of narcissistic schlock wherein I attempt to showcase just how amazing my life is, read on. Otherwise, it would be best to skip this. Honestly, I would not blame you at all. Professionally this year has held quite a roller coaster of changes. I changed firms, moving over to 44 Interactive. This brought with it a much wider range of responsibilities and opened doors into expanding my skills into a avenues that I had not yet explored. At the new...

About

Joseph Hallenbeck attended the RTIS program at DigiPen Institute of Technology, studied Victorian-era literature at the University of Oxford, and graduated from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD with a B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature. He has worked as an interpretive ranger, naturalist, and caver for the National Park Service and is now employed as a Software Engineer at Research Square in Durham, NC.